[11] The first inhabitant of Montevideo was the Genoese Giorgio Borghese (who Hispanicized his name to Jorge Burgues), who built a stone house on a ranch where he raised cattle before the city was founded.

[19] These first immigrants were found on the outskirts of Montevideo and were, for the most part, Piedmontese peasants, who arrived in a Uruguay at that time without industrial development, with extensive farming but little agricultural exploitation.

[21] Subsequently a significant number of colonists arrived from Sardinia and during the Uruguayan Civil War several Italians participated in the defense of the region led by Giuseppe Garibaldi.

[17] Some immigrants were the product of migratory movements that had previously occurred in Europe, as in the case of citizens of Italian origin born in Gibraltar, children or grandchildren of Ligurians.

[25] It was in the early 1860s that the number of immigrants began to grow, mostly from Liguria, Lombardy and Piedmont, and subsequently the arrival of workers from the south of the peninsula, mainly from Basilicata and Campania.

[26] In the second half of the 19th century, Uruguay experienced the highest percentage of demographic growth in South America where the country's population multiplied almost sevenfold between 1850 and 1900, due to immigration, mostly Italian.

[22] The "Taddei contract" was signed between Italy and Uruguay, which provided for the transfer to the South American country of between 2,000 and 3,000 Italian families, mainly farmers and day laborers of Lombard origin.

[37] The optimal relations between the two countries in that period increased with the arrival to the presidency in 1922 of José Serrato, the 70-year-old son of an Italian immigrant and the Minister of Foreign Affairs Pedro Manini.

[41] At the beginning of the World War II, Uruguay — hitherto neutral — broke off diplomatic, commercial and financial relations with Italy and with Axis countries in January 1942, shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

[50] Between the years 1879 and 1891 the company of Francisco Piria La Comercial was born, hence the name of the district, where, on the outskirts of Montevideo, plots of land were divided up and sold, which were mostly occupied by Italian immigrant workers.

[54] Italians were distributed throughout Montevideo and reached significant percentages of the total population of areas such as Cerrito de la Victoria (21%), Peñarol (20.5%) and Cordón (17%).

In the city of Colonia del Sacramento, 14% engaged in agriculture, while the rest remained in urban areas where the most popular jobs were bricklayers and carpenters; only 10.4% came from southern Italy.

Other of the more common occupations they held in the capital were peddler of bric-a-brac, fruit or vegetables, tinsmith, charcoal burner, garbage man, shoe shiner, and accordion player.

While the Ligurians, who had settled in the capital for the longest time, tended to monopolize small and large businesses, the Southerners carried out jobs such as shoemakers, unskilled workers, fruit peddlers, shoe shiners or labourers.

In a similar survey also carried out in Salto to highlight the employment trend, it emerged that 35% of the interviewees were engaged in commerce, 25% in agriculture, 28% in industry and crafts, and the 12% held other jobs.

The rejection was not only experienced in the city; the arrival of Italian workers in the countryside was perceived as an "invasion" by the Creoles who settled there, which led to violence and even the murder of immigrants.

Anthropologist Renzo Pi Hugarte stated that the Italian presence in Uruguay "has left deep marks in its popular culture, to the point that the elements that have come to distinguish it are generally perceived as originating in these places and not as adaptations of Italic models".

[94] Emerging in the popular neighborhoods of the Río de la Plata during the second half of the 19th century,[95] Lunfardo was another slang that combined Spanish with words of foreign origin, mostly coming from Italian dialects.

[100] Words of Italian root such as "chau", "guarda", "atenti", "minga", "facha" or "gamba" became part of the Rio Plateans vocabulary; also diminutive or pejorative suffixes were added.

[101] Along with the demographic expansion that Uruguay was experiencing, the construction industry flourished between the 1880s and 1920s in the Río de la Plata area, influenced by Italian and French architecture.

[111] Italian immigrants introduced some foods to Uruguay that began to be consumed frequently by the Uruguayan population, such as pasta, polenta, cotoletta, farinata and pizza.

[123] The tradition of serving gnocchi on the 29th of each month stems from a legend based on the story of Saint Pantaleon, a young doctor from Nicomedia who, after converting to Christianity, made a pilgrimage through northern Italy.

In Montevideo it was one of the most popular dishes in the early 20th century and, as in the United States, it was also adapted to local customs, in this case by including corvina and marine catfish.

[155] Buonaventura Caviglia arrived in Montevideo from Castel Vittorio (Liguria) in 1868 at the age of 21, an important entrepreneur and businessman who during the 1890s began to found various agro-industries to devote to the production of wine in the municipality of Mercedes from where it expanded and became the largest producer in the area.

[172] The mutual aid societies that proliferated in the capital in the 19th century began to spread to other parts of the country; in particular in 1869 some were founded in San José de Mayo and Pando, and in the following years they reached Trinidad, Carmelo, Nueva Palmira, Rocha and Rivera.

[183] L'Italiano, the first Italian-language newspaper in Uruguay, that was published weekly, appeared in 1841 and was founded by the Ligurian Giovanni Battista Cuneo, a pioneer of Italian journalism in South America and the first biographer of Giuseppe Garibaldi.

According to the writer Pantaleone Sergi "the drop in the migratory flow and the almost complete assimilation of the old emigration" did not favor the situation of the immigrant press, observing that in the following years it had an ever smaller diffusion.

[196] From 1958 to 1973, when he returned to Italy, Guiglia was in charge of the popular Italian music program La Voce d'Italia, which was also broadcast in Uruguay on CX 58 Radio Clarín.

[202] In June 1966, the national public broadcasting company of Italy RAI arrived in Montevideo, whose Uruguayan office was inaugurated in the presence of representatives of both countries; its headquarters were located in the center of the capital on 18 de Julio Avenue.

The politician, journalist and architect Aldo Lamorte presented Italia ti chiama on the VTV channel, dealing with issues related to the Italian Uruguayan community.